Humanities Forum: Globalization: How Google Transformed Ireland

ABSTRACTIn recent years, Ireland has been described as the most globalized western economy in the world, and has been included among the five most globalized nations for over a decade. How did an isolated, economically deprived country transform itself into the foremost representation for how globalization works? In this presentation, Julie Farrell discusses the ways in which Ireland strategically embraced the processes of globalization to compete in the emerging global economy. Specifically, she focuses on Ireland’s economic boom during the Celtic Tiger and its consequential alteration of Dublin’s urban spaces to recruit the American tech sector to its shores. Drawing from personal research within Google’s European Headquarters in Dublin, Farrell examines how the Googleplex has restructured the local environment in which it settled, and how the local environment has responded to such global change.

BIOGRAPHYJulie Farrell completed her Ph.D. in Social Sciences from University College Dublin in 2012. Her dissertation, "When Global Meets Local: The Strategic Embracement of Globalization in Ireland", examined the process by which Ireland achieved globalization and specifically focused on the ways in which the local environment altered itself to engage with these processes. Her fieldwork at Google's European Headquarters was the first internal research to be conducted at Google outside the United States. Farrell currently teaches CAL 495: Digital Media and Communications, and serves as the faculty mentor for the 2013 Stevens Solar Decathlon Communications Team.